About
Our Vision
Certa Dose wants to enable healthcare professionals to navigate emergency dosing with certainty, delivering peace of mind.
Our Mission
Certa Dose’s mission is to give healthcare providers the certainty that they are giving the correct dose of medication, empowering them to deliver medication safely to patients of all ages.
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Our story
Certa Dose’s story begins with a real-life event where a near overdose in the emergency room inspired a simple solution to one of the most challenging problems in medicine. For Dr. Caleb Hernandez, having a 5-year-old girl almost die under his watch because of a dosing error inspired him to find a better way.
Caleb, an emergency room physician, was in the middle of a busy shift when paramedics rushed in with a five-year-old girl in respiratory and cardiac arrest. While trying to revive the lifeless child, he noticed that a nurse was about to administer a life-threatening overdose. He alerted the nurse and averted the potentially fatal error. They corrected the mistake, so the emergency room team was able to bring the little girl back to life.
After helping save the girl’s life, Caleb recalls:
I was reflecting in the ER and saw the unused syringe filled with a ten times overdose. I knew that if we had given the child that amount of medicine, she wouldn’t be alive. I realized that the current approach to dosing children doesn’t make sense—why ask health care professionals to effectively take a complex math test under incredible stress while they are busy practicing medicine and trying to save a life?
After all, Caleb became a doctor to save lives. As he helped save a young girl’s life by preventing a potentially fatal overdose, he was inspired to develop a simple, effective solution that addresses the real-life challenges faced by healthcare professionals. The problem of dosing errors often arises because doctors and nurses use different systems to measure medicines. The complicated math needed to convert one standard to the other based on the patient’s weight can lead to mistakes, especially in emergencies. Caleb’s simple but powerful innovation was to take a pediatric color-coding system already broadly used by health care professionals and place it on the syringe.
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"It effectively provides a Rosetta Stone for pediatric dosing, making it simple and intuitive to confirm the correct dose. This gets everyone on the same page.”
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As a result of his emergency room epiphany, Caleb and the Certa Dose team continue to show commitment, through their products, by helping thousands of health care professionals provide better care for millions of patients.
Meet the Team
Dr. Caleb Hernandez, DO, FACEP
Chief Executive Officer | Founder | Chairperson of the Board
Dr. Caleb Hernandez is board certified in emergency medicine by the American Board of Emergency Medicine and is an American College of Emergency Physicians Fellow. He oversees First Responder Services as an EMS Medical Director in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Certa Dose is the result of Dr. Hernandez’s passion for patient safety and experience in emergency medicine. In developing Certa Dose, he’s been able to create a range of solutions to help reduce dosage errors and adverse drug events. He is listed as an inventor on multiple patents. Several peer-reviewed journals have published his work on this subject, and he is a regular speaker at emergency medicine conferences.
Chris Karageorge
Executive Vice President of Sales
Chris Karageorge has over 20 years of sales and leadership experience in the medical device industry. He has successfully led sales teams to stellar growth in both the hospital and pre-hospital markets for companies including Stryker, Physio-Control, and Medtronic Physio-Control. He is a proven Sales Leader who is uniquely equipped to deliver Certa Dose throughout the medical industry.